Calculation of effective properties of textile reinforced aluminum alloy by a two-step homogenization procedure

Abstract

Vehicle weight reduction is one of the main topics of modern automotive production. The use of aluminum and its alloys fulfils this requirement in an outstanding manner. Having the advantage of low density and therefore light weight, these materials still have a disadvantage in stiffness, which is lower than that of various steels. Here, textile reinforced aluminum cast parts offer excellent mechanical properties in lightweight design applications where high compression strength is needed. Such materials are inhomogeneous and their properties differ strongly from the properties of the initial aluminum alloy. To calculate the mechanical properties of the aluminum alloy, reinforced by ceramic (alumina) textile structure, homogenization based on asymptotic methods was used. On the macroscopic level, the material was considered being composed of the textile structure infiltrated by aluminum alloy. Here, the properties of the pure alumina could not be taken to describe the textile structure, because of the infiltration of the alloy in rovings, constructing the textile structure. So, on the microscopic level the rovings were considered as composed of the ceramic filaments infiltrated by aluminum alloy. In that way, calculation of the effective Young’s modulus and Poisson ratio of this material built the first level of the homogenization procedure. On the next step, these calculated values were used as properties of one of the structure components (textile) to calculate the effective mechanical behavior of the whole reinforced part.